When GNOME did its version 3 and Ubuntu came up with Unity, the popularity of Linux Mint sky-rocketed, because they stuck with GNOME 2.32. The Mint team has been working on their next version for a while now, and today, they first unveiled what they're working on. There's good news - the team is working on making GNOME 3 likeable. Their question for this release: "How do we make people like Gnome 3? And what do we provide as an alternative to those who still do not want to change?"

I applaud this move on the part of Linux Mint.
I'm personally staying on Debian stable with Gnome 2 after using LMDE for a while (and testing Xfce 4.8 build for Debian from debian-desktop.org), but watching closely what happens in the Mint world.